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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-06-17 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

SWINE FLU

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (15:23): I would like to put a slightly different slant on the swine flu pandemic that the world is experiencing. As a veterinarian, I think I can put a slightly different point of view on the origin of the virus, the potential for the virus to become a far more serious problem than it has been and what we humans have to fear from this novel new virus.

To go back a little to talk about swine influenza as it affects four-legged creatures, swine flu in pigs is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by a type A influenza virus and characterised by, as we are seeing in humans with this particular new virus, high morbidity but low mortality. In other words, lots of people are getting the flu but very few are dying from it.

This could change quite dramatically with this particular new virus. The swine influenza A virus occurs in most other countries around the world but does not occur in Australia. We are disease free when it comes to swine flu (as in the four-legged swine flu). In the same way that influenza A in humans changes a little bit and recurs every year, that is exactly what happens in pigs.

International outbreaks of spreading infections in people have been reported in the past; some have been associated with swine flu. I think the 1918 outbreak was associated with swine flu. No evidence was able to be proved at the time because there was not the standard of investigation available into virology and the origin of the disease. Rarely has swine flu (as in pig swine flu) been transmitted from human to human. In the same way as we have very occasionally seen bird flu transfer from birds to humans, so far it has not been transferred from human to human.

The point that I really want to make at the moment is that people think swine flu is a disease of pigs all over the world. It is not. Pigs in Australia are swine flu free; pork in Australia is safe to consume. In Egypt tens of thousands of pigs were slaughtered unnecessarily. It was completely ineffective in controlling the outbreak of this new virus that is being called swine flu.

The World Health Organisation has reported that there is a significant human to human transmission of this new virus. The new virus is a combination of two types of swine flu: an avian influenza and a human influenza—and this is the big worry. This is a serious worry. The Minister for Education, as a pathologist and with her training, has told me that she is very concerned about what could happen with this sort of a virus.

To the best of our knowledge we have not seen this sort of a virus before. The big issue with this virus is that pigs can get bird flu from birds, they can pick up human flu, and they have swine flu. We think this is how this virus came about.

My particular concern is now with the spread of this virus all over the world. At the moment it has high morbidity and low mortality; in other words, it is affecting many people but killing very few. What could happen is that this virus, particularly in Asian countries, where we are seeing a really nasty type of bird flu (H5N1), could recombine with the bird flu virus and produce a really nasty form of bird flu. It would be called swine flu, but you will not know the difference due to the genotyping. This is a real worry for me, and it is a real worry for all people in medical and veterinary professions.

I strongly encourage people to be alert to and alarmed by the fact that that this could happen. At the moment we have a very mild swine flu. Some people call it 'flu-lite'. I, personally, would not mind getting a dose of this because I think it might give me cross-protection from some other combination of a bird, pig and human virus. This will happen in pigs at some stage. I am very worried about it, and the medical profession and the government should be very worried about it, because when we do get the second wave, if it is the nasty wave, it will be very serious. It will cause serious numbers of deaths, the same as the 1918 influenza.

Time expired.

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